


Together in this Place

by joyfulseeker



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Chicago Blackhawks, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-28 09:18:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyfulseeker/pseuds/joyfulseeker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Practice is another reassuring mix of faces Patrick knows, drills he understands, Coach’s calls from the side. It feels good, like he’s flexing muscles that had gone tired and unused while he was over in Europe. He and Jonny are put on opposite sides playing keep-away, and he feels easier and easier on the ice, his pads and helmet a familiar weight on his body. He is going to light it up this season.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Together in this Place

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone needs to write their own nine month late version of "no more road roomies." Right?
> 
> This story was intended to be part of [svmadelyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/svmadelyn/pseuds/svmadelyn)'s [Stickhandled zine](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Stickhandled), but alas I was two weeks late to the deadline! Nonetheless, I was helped immeasurably by participating in that community, and I want to thank [svmadelyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/svmadelyn/pseuds/svmadelyn) for organizing it.

It feels like once Patrick gets the call in Switzerland, everything happens in fast-forward, from arranging travel to opening up his apartment to showing up for training camp again, finally. It’s a hustle, and Patrick is less jet-lagged than when he went over to Switzerland, but not by too much. 

Less than a day before they leave for LA, an email goes out from the travel and logistics guys with flight details. At the end, a throwaway detail, they mention that everyone except a couple of the newer guys have their own rooms, ask if anyone wants to keep a roommate during the season; they’ll accommodate preferences. Patrick's got his fingers poised over the keyboard to respond, because easy question for sure. He looks away from his laptop screen and then he's thinking about if he really wants to go back to an empty room at the end of each travel night, and he's suddenly not sure. So he says, "Whatever Jonny wants," and later the room assignments go out and he's on his own and so is Jonny, so. Decision made.

Later, of course, in the post-game interviews Patrick gets asked a couple questions about the road roommates thing. Jonny has made his opinion implicitly clear, so Patrick feels no shame in throwing Jonny's workout habits and clutter tendencies under the bus. He keeps some stuff to himself, though. Like the fact that Jonny always untucks his sheets and blankets at the bottom of his bed and still sticks his feet out the side so Patrick can catch his knees on them in the middle of the night. Or that he's got this weird little hitch to his breathing when he's really hard asleep, which at first really freaked Patrick out until he got used to it, because he'd wake up sure that Jonny had stopped breathing for a second. Anyway, it's not actually that much fun to talk about. He's glad when they go back to asking him about what the Blackhawks as a team can do better.

Probably the one thing Patrick liked about Switzerland more than Chicago was the relative lack of media attention. It wasn't totally gone or anything but mostly he could slip in and out after a couple minutes. Plus or minus a lot of "what"s and "could you repeat that?" because it turns out trying to fight through a lot of French or German-accented English was actually pretty exhausting. 

Anyway, he looks across the locker room away from the spread of digital recorders and microphones and cameras to where Jonny's holding his own court, and Jonny maybe feels his eyes because he looks up right then and smirks, then says something that sets everyone around him laughing. Whatever.

"What?" Patrick says, then, "uh, just keep producing I guess. Keep moving our feet, keep our speed up out there. I'm certainly not looking to take slack off. I know the boys are hungry for it, so, yeah, hopefully we can keep it going."

After the reporters have left he showers and dresses and heads out to the hallway. Sharpy falls into step with him and slings an arm over his shoulder.

"I hear you were saying nice things about me," Patrick says, looking sideways and tilting his head up.

"I can be nice," Sharpy says.

"Shit, am I dying?" Patrick says.

Sharpy squeezes his arm tight around Patrick's neck so he's brought stumbling into Sharpy's side. His jacket is rough against Patrick's cheek and he smells like locker room soap and deodorant.

"Hey," Patrick says, muffled.

"Take a compliment," Sharpy advises, and doesn't let up despite Patrick's protests until they get to the door to the parking lot. Patrick stands up and straightens his jacket with an offended look, but he feels better. Whatever, he likes Sharpy too, they can have a mutual admiration party. He turns the wrong way out the door by accident, and Sharpy grabs him by the back of the neck and steers him toward the bus, so then they're back to that.

Jonny's right there when Patrick gets up the stairs of the bus. He's staring pretty intently, like he just watched them turn over the puck on a powerplay for the tenth time and he's trying to figure out who fucked up and how to yell at them to fix it. Jesus Christ. Patrick doesn't need that shit, so he continues down the aisle and ends up a respectable distance from any captainly drama. Sharpy takes the seat right behind Jonny, because he has no sense of self-preservation.

Patrick still feels like his entire body is buzzing when he drops into his seat, leftover energy from the game. He flexes his toes in his shoes, pressing against the sore patches on the sides of his big toes and the ache in the ball of his right foot from where he always grips too hard in the heat of things. His left forearm is aching dully. Not badly, but lingering. He got it iced after the game, but he'll ice it again on the plane and then again before he goes to bed. 

He fishes his phone out of his pocket and swipes it open, but can't settle on any one activity, just thumbs through the icons until he's swept through to the search window three times in a row. 

On the plane, he gets his ice pack taped into place and settles back in his seat by the window to try and ignore it. He's got his eyes closed when someone drops down next to him. He doesn't even bother opening his eyes when Jonny's hand nudges up against his, back to back on the armrest, though he does angle his elbow a little so the ice pack isn't resting on Jonny's arm too. 

Jonny bumps his shoulder firmly into Patrick's. "Good game," he says, and leaves his weight there, leaning a little to one side, warm through Patrick's shirt.

"You too," Patrick says without opening his eyes. They sit like that for fifteen minutes, Jonny fiddling with his phone left-handed. Patrick isn't feeling any calmer despite his best efforts, probably because Jonny's crowding him back toward the window with his body heat and his congested breathing. Eventually, Patrick opens his eyes. "You feeling any better with that cold?"

"Slow going," Jonny says, "Be glad you're not rooming with me anymore. I think I woke myself up the other night snoring."

"It's soothing," Patrick says. "Like a snotty ocean." When he cuts his eyes to the side Jonny's giving him a judgment face pretty hard, but he's also bleary-eyed and sniffling, so Patrick feels more like he can just turn that right back around. "Have you taken any Nyquil?"

"That stuff doesn't work on me," Jonny says instantly. "It's not that kind of cold."

"You are made of so much shit," Patrick says, and leans over to dig through his bag. He always keeps a tab or two around, along with some Sudafed and Ibuprofen. He holds out the foil square and Johnny stares at it silently, not moving. Patrick stares back until Jonny breaks visibly and takes the pills, fishing his Gatorade out of the seat pocket in front of him to swallow them.

He makes a face as he swallows, and says, "I'm going to start calling you Mommy Kaner," as soon as he can talk. 

Patrick ignores him and rips off the tape holding his ice pack onto his arm. "Okay, let me out before you pass out," he says, and shoves the plastic bag against Jonny's neck, making him swear and punch Patrick hard in the ribs. He also stands up, though, and moves politely out of the way in the aisle so Patrick can get out, and stands up again when Patrick returns. They both nod off pretty quickly after that. When Patrick wakes up again, Jonny is snoring away and his entire body weight is leaning against Patrick in a line from shoulder to elbow.

It takes a good shake before he'll wake up after they land, and he's still obviously disoriented as everyone stands up. 

"I don't like this stuff," Jonny says grumpily. He’s blinking really slowly and his voice is a painful-sounding rasp. Patrick shoves him up and then gets both their bags. 

"Someone needs a nap," Shawzy says as he files by, and Jonny frowns.

"Give me my bag," he says. Patrick hands it to him, and then pushes him out into the aisle and off the plane. He dozes off again on the bus to the hotel, and then is so obviously out of it that Patrick pays attention to both of their room numbers and takes both key cards. Patrick is honestly glad Sharpy isn't paying attention to anything but his own forward progress toward his own bed, because otherwise he probably would get called Mommy Kaner in the locker room for the next ever after he walks Jonny to his room and unlocks the door for him. He leaves Jonny's duffel in the corner and his key card on the nightstand.

"Night, Jonny," he says, and closes the door on Jonny poking drowsily at his own shoelaces.

His own room is just down the hall and basically the same as Tazer's, of course. When he closes the door he can hear only muffled noises through the wall, some night owl with their TV on. It's too late to call home, since they're on the West Coast. His dad will already be in bed. He only gets to call after midnight five times per season, and right after the first game seems a little early, especially since he texted when they were waiting to get on the plane. It's pretty quiet, though.

He pulls out his charger and plugs his phone in, setting it down on the desk in the corner, pulls his bathroom stuff out and moves them to the sink in the bathroom. He could take a bath if he wanted, without someone complaining about him hogging the bathroom or that he was getting the room all steamy. He still remembers their rookie year, Jonny banging on the door and complaining that he had to use the toilet and that Patrick had plenty of opportunities with the tubs at the rinks. He ended up just walking in anyway and pissing while Patrick threw a wet washcloth at him and then complained about the smell of urine he left behind. That interlude dealt a pretty solid blow to any lingering normal boundaries Patrick'd had left after Juniors.

Patrick finds the remote and turns on the TV. He hits a Futurama rerun, great, in English, even better. He takes off his suit and hangs it up in the closet, thinks about stripping down to nothing just because he can, because nobody’s around to say anything about it. The air conditioning is up high enough that even in his underwear he’s picking up goose bumps, so he defiantly puts on a long-sleeved shirt instead. He watches two episodes of Futurama until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore. He pretends the whole time that he can’t hear the silence in the room around the dialogue from the TV.

Patrick gets woken up before his alarm the next morning by Jonny, who says, "Where's my room key?" before Patrick's even had a chance to swear at him or say hello.

"I want to go get ice, where's my room key," Jonny repeats.

"It's right by your fucking head on your nightstand, you moron," Patrick says.

"Oh," Jonny says. "Okay. Thanks."

"Fuck you," Patrick mutters into his pillow, and hangs up. He tries to go back to sleep, but it is literally twenty minutes before his alarm is set to go off. Also, that jitteriness is back in his bones and his mind has started bouncing around, thinking about the game ahead. He doesn't have anyone to bounce it off, so after dressing and brushing his teeth, he heads down to the lobby to see if anyone's up and wants to get food. He's tempted to pound on Jonny's door as he passes on his way to the elevator, but lucky for Jonny, Sharpy comes out to the hallway right then and distracts him. 

Sharpy is fiddling with his hair like an asshole, which means he doesn't see Patrick coming from the side when he jumps up and claps Sharpy on the back and chest.

"Ah, Jesus!" Sharpy gasps, dramatically clutching at his heart.

"Breakfast?" Patrick says.

"Coffee," Sharpy says. 

Shawzy and the kid, Saad, are already in the hotel restaurant when they get there. Shawzy’s talking a mile a minute while Saad is leaning over his plate like nothing else exists in the room.

“You talk all night, Shawzy?” Sharpy says as he grabs a plate for the breakfast buffet. “You know Saader’s a growing boy and needs his rest.”

“Eh, fu-screw you,” Shawzy says, stopping himself just in time when he sees a family in the corner eyeing him curiously. “I’m just keeping him from getting nervous playing with the big boys.”

“That fu-right?” Sharpy says.

“I’m not nervous,” Saader says placidly, and eats another bite of scrambled egg.

Sharpy glances at Patrick, like, ‘take a look at this guy,’ and Patrick shrugs before heading to the coffee machine. It’s one of those pod things, and the only pods left are decaf, which strikes Patrick as an almost criminal shortcoming.

“Hey, there any decent coffee around?” Patrick asks. 

“No,” Shawzy and Saader say in unison. 

“Jeeeeeesus,” Patrick says. He moves over to the buffet and glumly starts serving himself eggs and a bagel. Just because he shared a row with Jonny, he adds a glass of orange juice.

Shawzy, when Patrick tunes back in, is going on about Saader’s ridiculous packing job, which apparently offends Shawzy on organization, resource, and presentation grounds. “You only have one tie!” Shawzy says.

“it’s my lucky tie,” Saader says.

“I got you like three more ties back in the Hogs,” Shawzy says. “I made them lucky. Because they were a gift.”

“That’s awful sweet of you,” Sharpy says solemnly.

“I know, right?” Shawzy says. “Anyway, maybe if you had more than a single t-shirt you wouldn’t need to wear the hotel bathrobes. You don’t know where they’ve been.”

“I like those bathrobes,” Saader says. “I think it’s nice, they give you a bathrobe.”

“You’re sleeping on hotel sheets, Shawzy,” Patrick says. “You don’t know where they’ve been.”

“Hey, bud,” Shawzy says. “Don’t even start with the sheets. I want to sleep tonight.” 

“Sleep well?” Sharpy asks Patrick as Shawzy and Saader turn to talking about Shawzy’s tendency to have loud conversations with his girlfriend at midnight, which is clearly a conversation that doesn’t need anyone’s help.

Patrick tongues at his stitches, takes a sip of orange juice. It burns like a motherfucker. He leaves the rest of it on the table. “I’ve had better nights.”

“You still jet-lagging?” Sharpy says.

“It’s better going this direction,” Patrick shrugs. “I don’t know.” He looks up and Sharpy has that half smile on his face, like he’s waiting for Patrick to say something funny. Patrick shakes his head and quirks his lips up. “Maybe I’m not used to the quiet yet. That’s why I’m out here with you assholes, I guess.”

“Keep your stall next to the mutt, you’ll never get quiet again,” Sharpy says, and scrubs his hand over Shawzy’s head.

“Huh?” Shawzy says.

“That’s the plan,” Patrick says.

***

Jonny's obviously feeling better when Patrick sees him next, if the way he shoulder-checks his way in front of Patrick in line as they wait to get on the bus is anything to go by.

"We're not on skates, asshole," Patrick says and shoves him back. "You're just cutting in line."

Jonny's already smirking when he turns with obviously fake surprise to say, "Oh, Kaner, sorry bud, didn't see you there."

"Oh, yeah, didn't see you there," Patrick imitates, and then they're both shoving at each other, side by side, hips and shoulders jostling as they edge closer to the bus door. At the last minute Jonny dodges back so that Patrick lurches to the side. Jonny grabs Patrick around the arms from behind and manhandles him onto the bus.

"You're all peppy this morning," Patrick says, taking a seat.

Jonny drops down in the seat behind him. "Slept pretty well, good breakfast. I think the tide has turned."

“Knock on wood,” Patrick says, turning and reaching over the seat to rap his knuckles on Jonny’s head. Jonny dodges back, but too slow, retaliates with typical over-exuberance so that Patrick has to fish his baseball cap out from between the seats and is left rubbing at the friction track Jonny left behind on his neck. 

Patrick is starting to lose the weird funk he woke up in, starting to get excited again as everyone files onto the bus around him. He’s still left with this energy now that the jitteriness is fading. They played last night, they’re playing again tonight, he can feel the rhythm of the season settling into his hands and his feet, his muscles and bones. He needs to play.

Practice is another reassuring mix of faces he knows, drills he understands, Coach’s calls from the side. It feels good, like he’s flexing muscles that had gone tired and unused while he was over in Europe. He and Jonny are put on opposite sides playing keep-away, and he feels easier and easier on the ice, his pads and helmet a familiar weight on his body. He is going to light it up this season.

***

The first week passes almost in a blur, Phoenix, then back home, then Dallas, then Columbus, everything in fast forward, including those minutes on the ice each game. He’s having trouble settling down in the evening when he’s back in his hotel room. He’s spending a lot of time watching footage from previous years, but it never makes him feel more like sleeping, so he starts to set a limit for himself, he can watch them after breakfast if he’s on the road to pump himself up for practice, or before the game itself if he’s at home. 

He keeps hearing shit Jonny’s saying about him to the press across the locker room, mostly just joking around but about him and not to him, and they aren’t talking that much away from the locker room either. Jonny seems busy with Saader, who’s looking pretty wide-eyed and overwhelmed, and some of the newer guys. It’s rubbing at him in a way he can’t figure out, in a way that feels unfounded when he looks at the facts. Coach is happy with him and they’re winning games, but Patrick keeps wandering down to the players’ lounge at midnight to watch Bicks and Shawzy make fun of each other over Mario Kart instead of listening to Jonny talk to his brother in French.

When they head home after the game in Columbus, his bedroom is dark and quiet, and still has his suitcase from Switzerland spilling out over the carpet. He leaves his bag next to it and stumbles off to bed.

The next morning he trips over everything as soon as he gets out of bed, stubbing his toe and swearing as he hops toward the kitchen, where there is no coffee or food, just a jar of mustard, three cans of beer, a bottle of gatorade, and a single pickle floating in brine in a jar. His kitchen is scarily clean after a few months of bi-weekly cleaning and hardly any time at home, so clean he could eat right off the counters if he had any food. 

Patrick goes back to his bedroom and digs out his phone from his bag. Jonny’s been in town off and on since September. He may be in better shape, kitchen-wise, and at least has a captainly duty to tide Patrick over until Patrick has time to make a grocery run.

“Yeah,” Jonny says.

“What’s up?” Patrick says. “If you bring me coffee, eggs and milk I’ll make you pancakes.”

“I don’t want coffee-flavored pancakes, Pat,” Jonny says.

“Do you want breakfast?” Patrick asks.

“Uh,” Jonny says.

“Bring bacon,” Patrick says, and hangs up. He’s getting the mixing bowls out of the drawer when his phone buzzes. 

_Fine_ , it says. Then, _Ten minutes_. 

Jonny shows up in fifteen minutes, ruddy-cheeked and with ruffled hair, in his ugly brown coat with a canvas shopping bag over one shoulder and his backpack over the other. Patrick’s chest does something weird at the sight of him, a quick contraction that feels like the precursor to action.

“We’re going to have to go straight from here to morning skate,” Jonny warns, and sets the bag down on the counter. He strips off his jacket and goes back around the corner to drop it on the couch.

“Yeah, I know,” Patrick says, rolling up the bag of whole wheat flour and putting it back in the freezer. He raises his voice, “Feel free to make yourself useful with the bacon.”

“This is already more work than I was promised,” Jonny says, coming back into the room.

“Did you bring orange juice? I’m worried about getting your plague,” Patrick says. “Also, where’s my coffee.”

Jonny pointedly opens the bag and pulls out a tin of pre-ground, because Jonny has no soul or taste buds, but Patrick waves him at the coffeemaker and starts measuring out the wet ingredients. He finds an ancient stick of butter in the dairy compartment, score, because he forgot to ask Jonny to bring some. When he looks over, Jonny is opening a package of chicken breakfast sausage, not bacon, but it’s Patrick’s favorite brand and flavor.

“Since when do you like the smoked maple?” Patrick says.

“I don’t know,” Jonny says. “It’s just sausage, they’re all good.”

“That’s what--”

“If you make a ‘that’s what she said joke,’ I’m leaving, that one wasn’t even good,” Jonny says, but he opens one of the lower cabinets and pulls out a frying pan.

“Yeah, I can see you got one foot out the door already,” Patrick says.

Once Patrick has the first pancake going, he puts on another pan for eggs. “You want over-easy?” Patrick asks. He and Jonny are side by side in front of the stove until Jonny turns and leans against the counter, leaving the sausages just starting to sizzle in the pan.

“Yeah, three,” Jonny says. Weak winter sunlight is slanting through the windows across the kitchen table, glancing over Jonny’s shoulder in his soft blue cotton long-sleeved shirt. Patrick is suddenly reminded that he’s back in Chicago, starting a new season with his and Jonny’s traditional breakfast they’d started when neither of them could do more than pour cereal into a bowl. 

“Hey,” Patrick says, and smiles. He shifts forward a step, then back again.

“Hey,” Jonny echoes. “Welcome home.” It feels like the first thing Jonny’s said to him since he came back.

“Thanks,” Patrick says. He flips a pancake out onto a plate and shoves it in Jonny’s direction. 

Jonny puts it on the counter behind him, then moves back and pokes at the sausage and turns down the heat. He moves over to the coffee maker and fetches two mugs down from the cabinet and pours a cup for each of them, handing one to Patrick, saluting him wordlessly with the other.

Patrick takes a drink and presses his tongue to the wound on the inside of his lip when it flares up again. 

“Got you good, huh,” Jonny says. He reaches out and brushes a careful finger over the still-healing scar on Patrick’s upper lip, though the stitches are gone, then takes his hand back. Patrick blinks, not sure what to do with that deliberate touch. He licks at his upper lip in an automatic reflex and tastes salt from the cooking grease on Jonny’s fingertip.

“Yeah, I guess they wanted to give me a souvenir to take back with me,” he says.

“I would’ve been happier with a chocolate bar or something,” Jonny says.

“Sorry, I’m too cheap for that,” Patrick says.

“I’m aware,” Jonny says dryly. Patrick makes a face and flips another pancake and then pours another scoop of batter into the pan. The eggs are ready to be flipped, a delicate process. 

“Get your plate ready,” Patrick says. “I might fuck this up.” He only splits one of the yolks, which is pretty good for three fried eggs in the same pan. The yellow yolk starts to soak into the top pancake, but the other two sit with a skin of triumphantly-intact egg white over the yolk. Jonny likes runny yolk but perfectly-cooked whites, which has been a trial over the years. Patrick just likes his eggs sunny-side up.

They eat their eggs and the first couple pancakes standing up in the kitchen, then move over to the table when all the pancakes are cooked and the sausage is ready. Jonny gets up and fishes in his bag for a second, then returns with a jar of his mom’s jam, the label written in French. It looks like strawberry, which is Jonny’s favorite. He smears a layer over one of his remaining pancakes, then rolls it up into a cigar shape.

“That is so weird when you do that,” Patrick says. “It’s the weirdest thing you do. I think.”

“It gets the best distribution of flavor,” Jonny says. He cuts his pancake roll into small pieces with his knife and fork that he eats one by one, alternating with bites of sausage. He catches Patrick’s eye twice before Patrick realizes he’s staring. “What,” Jonny says, and wipes at his mouth with a napkin.

“Nothing,” Patrick says.

“No, what,” Jonny demands.

“You’ve got a little,” Patrick lies, and taps his own cheek.

“Oh.” Jonny dabs at his face. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Patrick says. He looks down at where his hands are beating out a rhythm on the table, then picks up his plate and takes it back to the dishwasher. Jonny’s still eating, and Patrick sits back down at the table. He didn’t think, when he was in Switzerland, that he’d missed Jonny as much as he’d missed hockey and his team. Patrick has never had a season yet with the Blackhawks where he could miss Jonny, though last season came close. He recognizes this feeling for what it is, though, and it’s more than just missing playing with Jonny. 

“I hear you’ve been talking shit about me going away to Switzerland,” he says.

“Just giving you a hard time,” Jonny says. “You can take it.”

“Yeah, well,” Patrick says. “Thanks for helping to hold the walls up during the contract negotiations, I guess.”

“We can’t all pull a Patrick Kane,” Jonny says.

“Yeah, twenty-three points in twenty games.”

“Care more about how many points you score here,” Jonny says, and Patrick shrugs.

“I’m working on it,” he says.

It ends up being a hustle, in the end, getting to morning skate. Jonny drives, arguing that Patrick’s driving skills have probably degraded in Switzerland, even though Patrick had the club’s car and drove every day. It’s not worth an argument, especially when it means Patrick doesn’t have to deal with traffic. 

Jonny is actually really noisy, it’s one of the first things Patrick noticed about him; he takes up a lot of space, even for a hockey player. In the driver’s seat he stretches his right arm out on the armrest, drives aggressively, checks the mirrors emphatically, fiddles with the radio a lot. It’d be terrifying if Patrick wasn’t used to it. Jonny talks about the errands he needs to run after practice, wonders whether he’ll be able to get to the post office before it closes since he has to mail his favorite cousin a birthday present. He’s talking just to talk, which is atypical. They’ve always been able to be quiet together when it’s just the two of them, at least since they started rooming together.

Patrick runs his fingers along his forearm and looks out the window at the downtown passing by, then turns and looks at Jonny. He says, “With this compressed schedule I don’t think Q’ll run us too hard, I mean, the season will do that soon enough. So you’ll probably have time to go to the post office.”

“I hope so,” Jonny repeats.

Q doesn’t actually skate them too hard, and after workouts, showering, and team lunch, Jonny drops Patrick back off at his apartment. Things stay a little weird all day. Jonny isn’t talking much in the car on the way back, but Patrick feels sufficiently off-balance to not talk much either, and the atmosphere feels uneasy. He calls his family and talks on bluetooth while he finally finishes unpacking from Switzerland. He looks up his game schedule and makes a stab at trying to figure out how many groceries he needs for the next week or so before giving up. Pancakes with Jonny will have to be it for cooking for the week. 

He jerks off, because it always makes him sleepy, reveling in sprawling naked his own bed. He licks his lips and then remembers Jonny touching him, right there, what was that about? He and Jonny don’t touch much, not like that, and he can’t tell if he wants more of that, but he’s thinking about it when he puts his hand back on his dick. He’s remembering the look of Jonny when he came in the door, and it’s--he pictures how it maybe would have gone if he’d followed that impulse forward, what would Jonny have done? 

He rubs the soles of his feet against his sheets, restless. He slicks his palm with a little more moisturizer and tightens his fist, gets a rhythm going that he likes, as he thinks about where that touch could have taken them. He could have taken Jonny’s hand and drawn it down to his mouth, taken it inside. He’s done that before, he likes it. Men and women both usually like it, but men have bigger fingers and they’re more startled, whereas a lot of girls giggle and then look shy. 

Jonny would have been startled. He gets this look when he’s really surprised, eyes open wide, mouth slack. It’s working for Patrick right now to think about that. Then maybe Jonny would have pushed him down, onto his knees, because he likes that too. Jonny seems like he’d be pretty handsy, too, heavy on Patrick’s neck and shoulders, maybe the back of his head too, not too solicitous. It’s pretty vanilla as fantasies go, but jesus christ is it working for Patrick right now. 

He lifts his dry hand and tugs on his hair for a second and feels it flare down his body, working him up more. He’s at the point now where he doesn’t need much else, and now he’s not thinking about anything except himself and his hand moving slickly on his dick, heartbeat in his ears, breath picking up speed before he comes.

He takes a nap and then wakes up to a mass text about dinner from the Rockford crew. Jonny doesn’t make an appearance, but Patrick is on-edge for the first fifteen minutes, waiting. 

He doesn’t look for Jonny in the locker room while he’s dressing, avoiding making eye contact. The mood in the room is odd, a little low energy. Patrick focuses on getting his gear on perfect. His shoulder feels tight before he settles his pads on and he rotates his arm, trying to work it out. Shawzy is jolting around in the stall next to him, singing under his breath to the music playing from the stereo as he slides his elbow pads on. 

Coach Q walks into the room and stands next to the whiteboard, and the music goes off. As he talks, Patrick puts his head down and looks at the floor and tries to focus just on what’s going on around him and what’s in front of him. He looks up and meets Jonny’s eyes across the room for a long moment before Jonny looks back at Coach’s diagram of their positioning.

It ends up being the kind of game Patrick hates to play, where he can’t seem to find his stride, can’t seem to make anything happen. “Fuck me,” he says, working his way back to the bench after his one shot on goal. “Fuck me.” They squeak out a win, but not the kind anyone wants to write home about. 

“Good game,” Jonny says, waiting at the bench door as they’re filing off the ice. He grabs the back of Patrick’s neck and shakes a little, nothing he hasn’t done before. Patrick sucks in a sharp breath, feeling himself go hot and then cold, and stumbles past him. “Good job, Hoss,” he hears Jonny say behind him. “Good fucking work, Leddy-boy.”

***

If Patrick thought it was going to be a one time deal, jerking off thinking about Jonny, he’d have been wrong, because the truth is it keeps happening. He’s never thought of himself as into the things Jonny exemplifies. Patrick mostly goes for guys who are smaller than him, not hockey players, guys that he can feel taller than, but he likes Jonny’s size when he thinks about it. Jonny crowds him up against a wall on afternoon in Calgary trying to get a soccer ball away from him, and Patrick thinks about that moment later, when Jonny was pressed up tight against his back, hand bracketing him on the wall, caging him in on one side. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time on the ice together, working together, so even subconsciously Patrick sees Jonny’s size as a good thing. Or maybe he just likes Jonny.

He feels shifty as hell about it later, though, when the team’s together watching the Superbowl in a hotel conference room in San Jose. It’s an off day and not too many of the guys have skin in the game, so the mood in the room is pretty mellow, aside from Beyonce’s performance and the power-outage afterward. 

Patrick is feeling jittery enough that he keeps migrating from the couches to the snack table in the back for more nachos. After a while he finds that he’s given away his seat in front to Hammer, so he takes a seat in the back at a table with Bicks and Shawzy. He ends up an easy target for Brad from Blackhawks TV, who makes him stand up and talk about the awesomeness of having a day off when there’s a sporting event. Whatever makes the fans happy, he guesses.

The game ends early enough that everyone starts making plans to get dinner, splitting off into little groups by food type. Patrick ends up in the group with Sharpy, Jonny, and Seabs going for Korean, based around a quick Yelp search that promised to be close, good, and open. The place ends up being a mixture of restaurant and soju bar, basically dead except for them. 

Jonny looks dubious when the side dishes show up. “Do we each get..two?”

“No, man, you share them,” Patrick says. “And then you decide which one’s the best. The main dishes are coming later.”

“You should try that one,” Sharpy says, pointing at the spiciest-looking kimchi. Jonny looks at him, then reaches across Patrick to try the eggplant. Patrick shrugs and takes a piece of the kimchi, which isn’t actually that spicy. They end up going through three servings of the side dishes before the end of the meal, which, Seabs points out, must work out to at least one extra dish.

“Good value,” he says.

“Wow,” Jonny drawls. “I’m glad this dinner doesn’t break the bank. Gonna put that extra money on the board?”

“As long as it’s not something about the S-T-R-E-A-K,” Seabs says. 

“The team morale improvement fund is looking really healthy right now,” Sharpy says, looking deeply satisfied, which Jonny echoes a second later, leaning back in the booth and encroaching on Patrick’s space with his smug elbows.

This is not a side of Jonny Patrick should find attractive, but he still wants to move closer instead of away.

“That’s all great, except we’re never gonna get a chance to spend it,” Patrick says, “with this schedule.”

“I have plans,” Sharpy says.

“You’re an old boring dad now,” Patrick says. “What’s the plan, play with Legos and then take a nap?”

“Spoken like someone who didn’t do exactly that last week,” Sharpy says.

“I was entertaining Maddy,” Patrick protests.

“You brought your own Legos,” Sharpy says.

Seabs looks disapproving. “Maddy is way too young to play with Legos.”

“I’m starting the future engineer of America early,” Patrick says. “Plus I watched really carefully to make sure she didn’t try to eat any of them. Anyway, she’s going to be a genius, obviously.”

Sharpy says, “Obviously.”

“Like, the tower could use some work in standing up, but the dimensions were creative.”

“She’s the future engineer of Canada,” Jonny says.

“Uh, no,” Patrick says. “She was born in the States. So.”

“So,” Jonny says. “Dual citizenship, look it up.” He looks across the table. “Sharpy.” It’s his Captain’s voice, his I-trust-you-not-to-fuck-this-up voice.

“Fuck you, _Sharpy_ ,” Patrick says.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Sharpy says. “Let’s not get split on arbitrary country lines. My daughter will of course choose which country holds her loyalty, and that country will of course be our glorious nation of Canada, where all the worthiest men and women are from.”

Patrick scoffs, loudly, to the sound of all the other Canadians cheering, and makes plans to infiltrate Maddy’s wardrobe with appropriately patriotic clothing. For now.

Patrick heads to the bathroom on their way out of the restaurant, and when he gets outside, only Jonny is left standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

“Seabs and Sharpy stole the cab,” he says, not sounding too upset.

“Assholes,” Patrick says half-heartedly, but he’s not feeling tragic about not being forced to cram into the middle seat because he’s the shortest. “Did you call another one?”

“Nah,” Jonny says. “I don’t think we’re too far. I figured we could walk. It’s not a bad night.”

It’s true, actually, god bless California for that, at least. Early February but he doesn’t even need a jacket, really. Someone across the street is hurrying away in a down jacket and a hat. Patrick laughs.

“What?” Jonny says.

“Guy’s preparing for a blizzard, there,” Patrick says, pointing his chin at the man, and Jonny scoffs.

They’re heading toward what Patrick vaguely recalls as the city center, but he stops after a street and checks, “Wait, you know where we’re going, right?” He’s not good with maps, which is why he got an iPhone pretty much as soon as they came out and has updated it religiously with the new model every year. He gives his old models to his sisters. Even still, half the time he winds up walking two blocks in the wrong direction before he checks the map again and turns around. Jonny generally knows where he’s going though.

“Yeah,” Jonny says. They walk away from the lit up little business district and then they’re in the residential blocks that circle the light rail and park blocks that lead into the downtown mall around the arena. The sun is down now and the temperature is in the fifties, but it still smells like spring to Patrick. Earlier in the cab they passed a row of blooming fruit trees that were just starting to drop their petals. Right now in Chicago Patrick has to scrape slush off his shoes every time he walks outside, but California is a crazy kind of country.

“How’s the family?” Patrick asks. He feels like he hasn’t truly talked to Jonny in days, which is probably true, if he counts back.

“Good,” Jonny says. “How’s yours?”

“Goood,” Patrick mocks. “I mean, it sounds like I’ll have a new crop of boyfriends to intimidate when I go home, but I think I’m up to the job.”

“Right,” Jonny says, sounding skeptical. “You need backup, bud. Should take Carbomb home with you. Have him smile nice and slow.”

“And then beat them at chess?” Patrick says.

“Shut up, I’m still learning,” Jonny says, but he’s smiling, and he drifts to the side so he can shove Patrick affectionately forward.

“Oh, sure,” Patrick says.

“Because you’re so good at chess,” Jonny says.

“I could be,” Patrick says.

“Fine, we’ll play a game when we get back to the hotel,” Jonny says. 

“I don’t know why I missed you,” Patrick says.

“What?” Jonny says, sounding surprised. “It’s not like I’ve gone anywhere.”

Patrick flushes, and is glad for how dark it is, so Jonny can’t see his face clearly, because who knows what it’s saying considering the shit coming out his mouth.

“Whatever, man,” Patrick says, trying to blow it off. 

“I mean, I missed you too, I guess,” Jonny says, and Patrick is surprised into a laugh. 

“Don’t force it,” he says.

“I always trust that you’ll be here when we come back to Chicago,” Jonny says.

Patrick swallows, not sure how they ended up in this emotional bog, but willing to take the blame. He redirects their conversation toward their upcoming game with Phoenix, but he feels a little warmed anyway.

When they get back to the hotel, Jonny says, “Meet me in my room? I need to grab the travel board from Carbomb.”

“You really want to play a game?” Patrick says.

Jonny’s face, which had been open and, Patrick realizes in retrospect, a little shy, shutters as he pulls out a version of his press-face. “If you don’t want to--”

“No, I want to,” Patrick says hastily. “But for real, you are actually going to have to teach me how to play.”

“That’ll be easy,” Jonny says. “Honest, it’s not hard, it’s just the strategy that gets complicated.”

“Okay…” Patrick says. This is starting to sound like a process.

They go their separate ways after they get out of the elevator, and Patrick makes a quick pit-stop in his own room to leave his wallet, plug in his phone, and grab a water bottle. He gets to Jonny’s door at the same time as Jonny, now carrying a small plastic case in one hand with a checkerboard pattern on either side. 

Inside the room, Jonny kicks his shoes off against the wall, then settles on the bed. He motions Patrick to the other side, and Patrick toes his own shoes off and sits down opposite him. The unmade bedclothes crumple underneath him, and Patrick moves to get comfortable, sliding back until he can lean against the headboard. 

This is the first time he’s been in Jonny’s hotel room since they stopped rooming together, and it looks exactly like Jonny’s side of their shared hotel rooms, except more so. It’s like now that he doesn’t need to worry about keeping his stuff out of Patrick’s way, it’s expanded to fill the available space. His suit jacket is draped over the desk chair, two socks are scattered in random directions on the floor, his backpack is leaning against the wall near the bathroom, his iPad is sitting propped up on its stand on the desk, and his bag has a mess of clothing spilling out its open mouth. 

When Patrick looks back toward Jonny, he’s opening up the plastic case, removing the pieces and flattening the case into a board. It’s weirdly quiet in the room without the TV on, which Patrick doesn’t remember from when they shared a room together. It’s apparent to him that he is explicitly a guest, invited into Jonny’s space. 

Patrick shifts on the bed. This evening would have been easier before Patrick started thinking about Jonny outside the box he sat in for years, teammate and friend and Captain. Instead, as Jonny sets up the board, Patrick is thinking about how easy it would be to push it to the side and let the tiny plastic pieces get lost in the sheets, just climb his way over and intercept Jonny’s hands so that Jonny could touch him instead. Patrick presses his tongue down on his lower lip and sits back even further, far enough back that he actually misjudges and starts to slip off the bed until a last minute flail and Jonny grabbing his arm pulls him back onto the mattress.

“Jesus, I thought you were a professional athlete,” Jonny bitches. “You fucked up the board.”

“Shut up,” Patrick says, glad he can blame embarrassment and last-minute adrenaline for how red his face is. “Anyway, aren’t you supposed to show me how to play this game?”

It turns out that chess is a lot of making a move with one of the funny little pieces, having Jonny correct him as to which way that piece was supposed to go, making another move, and watching Jonny make a face at what is apparently a completely horrendous choice. Then, watching as Jonny takes approximately a thousand years to make another move. Patrick had already kind of known that from seeing Jonny and Carcillo play on the plane out the corner of his eye. He just maybe didn’t...know. 

It turns out to be a lot of staring at Jonny. Jonny keeps looking up and widening his eyes or raising his eyebrows, like, “what?” and then looking back down at the board, maybe to model proper chess-playing behavior. Patrick doesn’t quite understand it, though, because he’s pretty sure that he has to wait until Jonny makes a move before he can respond. 

Jonny’s looking good, even outside the weird brain fog Patrick seems to be living in right now related to the guy. As much as the lockout sucked, in some ways it was good for Jonny. He looks more relaxed now than he did even at the end of the summer, like the extra four months of not playing League hockey helped smooth out the rough edges of concussion recovery from last season.

“Hey,” Jonny says. “Your move.”

Patrick looks back down at the board. “Oh. You took one of my. pointy things.”

“Pointy things?” Jonny says.

“You know, looks kind of like a dick.”

“The _bishop_?” Jonny says. “That’s the piece that represents the Church, Kaner, you’re disgusting.”

Patrick rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, shaking his head.

“Anyway,” Jonny says. “The pawn looks way more like a penis.”

“Not compared to the bishop,” Patrick says. “Or maybe the tall one without the cross.”

“The queen. You think the female piece looks like a dick.”

“This is a dirty game,” Patrick says.

“I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder,” Jonny says with extreme judgment. “If you don’t want to keep playing though we can stop. Since I’m winning.”

“No, I want to keep playing,” Patrick says. “And also fuck you, you’re winning.”

Jonny shrugs, and then makes a face when Patrick moves a pawn kind of at random.

“Check,” Jonny says, moving his horse.

“What?” Patrick says.

“It means I’m gonna win soon if you don’t pay attention.”

“I’m paying attention!” Patrick protests. He squints at the board and edges his king sideways.

Jonny sighs. “Checkmate.”

“What?” Patrick says again.

“I told you,” Jonny says, and moves his bishop, knocking over Patrick’s king. “Anyway, I win.”

“Hey!” Patrick says.

“I gave you a warning,” Jonny says.

Patrick slumps backward and then wriggles down the headboard until he’s lying flat on the bed. He started feeling sleepy halfway through the game. His crushing loss is finishing the job. He turns over on his side to face Jonny, now not really on his bed but in it, listening to the plastic pieces plinking softly as Jonny drops them into the case. The sound stops after a second. Jonny was putting the board away, but he’s now just sitting with the case spread open like a book in his lap, and he’s looking at Patrick. 

After a second, Jonny pours the rest of the pieces into the case and fastens it closed again, then reaches over Patrick to set it on the nightstand closest to the door. He’s warm and hovering over Patrick for one second before he settles back on his haunches. Patrick lets out his breath in a sudden and involuntary exhale, which makes him realize that he had been holding it before. He’s now feeling completely awake. Like Jonny just dumped cold water on him.

Patrick sits up and runs his hand over his hair.

“All right,” Patrick says. “I think I’m falling asleep here. I better get back to my room.”

“Right, yeah,” Jonny says.

“Okay,” Patrick says. He gets off the bed. “Sleep well, Jonny.”

“You too,” Jonny says, and Patrick closes the door behind himself.

When Patrick gets back to his own room, he scrubs his hand over his face, but he knows what he’s going to do. There feel like a lot of ways this night could have gone differently. He thinks about crawling over and straddling Jonny up against the same padded hotel bed headboard as he’s leaning against right now, rubbing their bodies together, he thinks about kissing the underside of Jonny’s jaw right over his pulse, then about kissing Jonny full on the mouth and the way Jonny would have to be looking up at him to do it. He thinks about cupping Jonny’s head in his hands to hold him in place, how his thighs and weight would pin Jonny down so he’d have to work pretty hard to get Patrick into a different position, and so maybe he’d just have to take what Patrick wanted to give him. 

Patrick rubs low down on his stomach, up and down his thighs in a regular rhythm, then over his dick, thinking about that push and pull. He thinks about that moment when Jonny was spread out over him, how he could have knocked Jonny’s supporting hand out from under him so that Jonny’s weight settled on top of him. He thinks about how he could feel the heat from Jonny’s body all along his side. He could smell Jonny’s shave cream and soap on his skin. He was in Jonny’s bed, lying on Jonny’s sheets, exactly like this bed and these sheets. Patrick works his hand, revving himself up tighter and tighter, and it doesn’t take too much more for him to come into his own palm.

Afterward, hazily, Patrick thinks that he wouldn’t do it if it didn’t feel so damn good. If it didn’t work for him so well.

***

It’s getting crazy in the locker room as February rolls along toward March. Crazy like Patrick’s only seen in the build up to a good Stanley Cup run, reporters lined up like kids waiting for the school bus to talk to him and Sharpy, Jonny, Hossa, Duncs and Seabs. Crow and Razor are getting their fair share of attention too, and as time goes on everyone’s starting to hear more about it. 

Seabs has stopped talking much. Patrick envies him that luxury. There’s only so many ways to say that playing on a winning team is fun, that he’s glad it’s going well, that he’s doing everything he can to keep it going. Plus, he gets on a little bit of a scoring drought, which means he also has to explain how not-worried he is about eventually getting the puck in the net.

He paces around his living room, complaining about it to his dad on the phone, who lets him talk long enough that Patrick starts to get ashamed of the sound of his own voice.

“Well, Buzz,” his dad says finally, “this is a good story to tell. You could try enjoying being part of it.”

“I am,” Patrick protests.

“Every job, you gotta shovel some shit,” his dad says.

Patrick sits down on the couch and pokes through the ancient candies in a bowl on his coffee table. They’re Werther’s Originals that his grandparents sent him for his birthday. They arrived already gooey with age, so he doesn’t know how long they sat in a bag in his grandparents’ place before they sat in storage in the package room for a month until he brought them upstairs with everything else when he came back briefly in December. 

“I guess,” Patrick says. He unwraps one of the candies and bites through the gummy shell until he gets to the caramel on the inside. He doesn’t even like Werther’s candies.

“You guess, you guess,” his dad says. “Should I tell your mom you’re complaining now?”

“No,” Patrick says, knee-jerk. 

“Anyway, you guys are going to give me heart palpitations if you keep going to overtime and shootouts, kid.”

“I’m trying,” Patrick says. “But we got to keep you interested.”

“Be less interesting. It’ll be better for my health,” his dad says.

“Your health is fine, right?” Patrick demands. He stands up again and walks over to his stereo system, then back to the couch, then over to the floor-length window. “Give the phone to Mom.”

“Healthy as a horse,” his dad says. “Especially with all this great stress-testing.”

Patrick stretches his neck one way, then the other, and listens for the pop. He’s thinking about going in early to see if he can get a soak and a massage, he’s carrying a lot of tension lately.

He thinks things are weird between him and Jonny right now. He’s not sure, though. It’s a little hard for him to tell. Jonny hasn’t invited him back over for any more chess games, and neither of them mentioned the game to any of their teammates, that he’s seen. He certainly hasn’t talked about it and he’d sure as shit hear about it if Jonny had. He’s back to spending a lot of time on the road in the Mario Kart lounge.

“How else are things going?” his dad asks.

“Good,” Patrick says. “I mean, good.”

“Yeah?” his dad says.

“Yeah,” Patrick says and shrugs, then makes a face at himself. “I guess it’s still kind of quiet when we’re on the road.” 

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” his dad says.

It’s not the right kind of quiet, Patrick doesn’t say. “No,” he says. “Anyway, I gotta go. Things to do, places to see.”

“All right, good game tonight, kiddo,” his dad says.

“Thanks,” Patrick says. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” his dad says, and Patrick hangs up. 

He puts the phone down on his coffee table and wanders into the kitchen and opens the fridge. Now, at mid-February, he’s finally been home for a long enough stretch to get groceries, which means that he’s looking at a half gallon of milk, a loaf of whole wheat bread, a block of cheese, a package of turkey breast lunch meat, a bag of premade salad mix, and a case of Gatorade. None of it looks great, but Patrick sighs and starts making himself two sandwiches anyway. He eats standing up in his living room, looking out his windows at the city below. It’s a gray day, clouds moving fast across the surface of the Lake. When he touches the window glass he can feel it shiver every once in a while with the winds whipping through the city.

It’s getting close to time for his nap, and he should be tired, he can feel it lurking in his body, but his brain keeps lurching from thought to thought. Like, they’re playing Vancouver tonight, maybe he can finally make something happen. Maybe he can get one over on Lu tonight, he always appreciates that. Or, what if Jonny’s into him too, and that’s why things have gotten so weird. His stomach flips at the thought, like he’s scared to be right or wrong, and that sends him over to his video game system almost on autopilot to distract himself. It takes him another hour to settle down, so he ends up shorting his nap and going in for his warm up tense and cranky.

Sharpy, as soon as he sees him, say, “What’s with that face? What’s with that face?”

“Fuck off,” Patrick says.

“You look like my daughter when she wakes up from her nap,” Sharpy says, and screws his face up like he’s about it cry. It actually looks really unattractive, enough that Patrick starts laughing despite himself. 

“There we go,” Sharpy says, and smacks Patrick on the ass as he heads over to the skate sharpener.

Patrick rolls his eyes. He scans the room, which is filling up slowly. Jonny hasn’t arrived yet. Patrick doesn’t think he’s anticipating anything, but when Jonny walks in the room and heads straight to his stall without looking around, Patrick feels relieved not to have to fake anything through eye contact. The IceHog boys are rambunctious on one end of the locker room bench, riling themselves up, and Patrick lets their energy carry himself along and onto the ice.

It’s a great game up until Hossa goes down, and then after that is a scramble to stay on top of everything, so of course it goes to a shoot out. Q taps Jonny, then Patrick, and then visibly hesitates before tapping Shawzy, whose face sets into a grimace of terrified determination. There’s absolutely no way for blood to drain out of someone’s face while playing a hockey game, but Shawzy gives it a shot.

“All right, Mutt, you’ve got it in the bag,” Patrick says while testing the taping on his blade. 

Shawzy’s mouth moves in something that looks like, oh, or no, before he shakes his head. “Yeah, fuckin’ right.”

“Attaboy,” Patrick says, and cuffs him over the helmet.

Jonny looks at him and nods.

“Show me something good,” Patrick says.

“Gotta go fast with Schneider,” Jonny says.

“So show me something fast,” Patrick says.

Jonny looks at Patrick, gives his own helmet tap, and then he’s hoisting himself over the boards and skating out to the center of the ice.

The first round ends in nothing, and then it’s Patrick’s turn on the ice. The crowd is a dull roar in his ears, Schneider hulking in net off in the distance, and he circles, breathes in and kicks off. It’s fast, close, five-hole and then Patrick’s fighting not to fall over Schneider’s stick. He’d swear it went in, but the refs are waving it off, saying it was no goal. Patrick shakes his head and skates back to the bench.

“It was a fucking goal!” he shouts over the noise of the crowd, and he can see Q calling for a video review. “That was a goal,” he says to Jonny, who’s looking grim-faced at the Jumbotron. Toronto calls it a goal, and replay shows Schneider’s pads pushing the puck just inside the line. It’s ugly, but it’s a goal.

Razor lets in the next Canucks shot. It’s Shawzy’s turn, and he mumbles something and shoves himself up and over the boards. Patrick stares up at the screen, Sharpy jostling him on one side, and watches as Shawzy nets himself a beautiful goal, textbook perfect. Patrick’s hands shoot up and he’s hugging Sharpy and then Jonny, fucking hockey, goddamn there’s nothing he loves more in the world. Nothing. Razor catches Kesler’s shot out of the air, and then it’s all over except for the cheering.

***

They go out that night, taking advantage of one of their few off days the next day to see somewhere that isn’t the inside of a hotel room, a locker room, or their own houses. It’s a Tuesday night, so the bar isn’t exactly busy, but Patrick’s not sad about the chance to sit with a beer and a big glass of water, alternating the two. A lot of the guys with families peel off after an hour. Jonny’s looking kind of antsy, so it’s surprising when he slides in next to Patrick on one side of the booth with another beer for both of them. Patrick thought for sure he was angling to head out along with Duncs and Seabs.

“Thanks,” Patrick says and clinks their glasses together. He turns so his back is to the wall, so he can see Jonny and the rest of the room.

“Good season, eh?” Jonny says.

“Not bad,” Patrick smirks, and then resettles his hat from Jonny’s forceful head scratch. Over Jonny’s right shoulder he can see that Bicks and Leddy are trying to start a pool game, which could be fun.

Oduya, who was across the table from them playing with something on his phone, slides out of the booth with a wave. “My girlfriend,” he says, and then just walks out of the bar.

“Oh, all right,” Jonny says. “I guess we were boring.”

“Come on, Taze,” Patrick laughs. “Getting laid, or hanging around with you assholes.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Jonny says.

Patrick’s not sure what that means, but he plays it off. “I never do.” Jonny is pressing at his neck and shoulder, massaging the line of muscle like his neck is bothering him. It’s very distracting. Patrick wants to say, could you stop that so I can hold a conversation with you, but instead he looks over Jonny’s shoulder at the pool game again. 

When he looks back, Jonny is no longer actively pressing in, just running his fingertips up and down the side of his throat. Patrick follows his motions with his eyes for a long second before looking back at Jonny’s face, to find that Jonny is already looking at him. Patrick can feel heat flushing through his entire body at Jonny’s steady, dark-eyed gaze. Jonny’s leaning in toward him a little, one arm up on the back of the booth. He brings the other arm down to brace his hand on the table. Patrick’s eyes follow his hand helplessly like Jonny’s got his attention on a leash. 

“I thought I might be making this up,” Jonny says, and Patrick’s eyes shoot up to his face. His expression is unreadable to Patrick, but not hostile.

“What?” Patrick says. 

Jonny doesn’t say anything, but he reaches out and draws two fingers lightly down Patrick’s forearm and across his knuckles on the table. Patrick feels his skin tingle up and down his arm in the wake of that soft, deliberate touch, and he sucks in an unexpected breath.

Neither of them say anything, and Patrick feels shaky with nerves. He licks his lips and finally says, “Let’s get out of here.”

Jonny nods and lifts his hand away, turning and sliding out of the booth. They both have to make their rounds, mercifully brief now that the crowd has already thinned. They wait outside the bar for their cab and Patrick huddles into the upturned collar of his coat. He angles himself into Jonny’s bulk against the wind. Jonny lets him without comment. Both of these things are familiar to Patrick from similar nights over the years, but the humming tension he still feels between them is new.

“Where we going?” Jonny asks when the cab arrives, and Patrick can read the play without Jonny saying anything else. Patrick decides their next move.

“My place,” Patrick says. It has the advantage of being closer, and Patrick wants to match Jonny’s decisiveness with action.

In the cab, Jonny takes a grip on Patrick’s wrist, almost hidden in the way their winter coats overlap in the back seat. It’s not, quite, tender, not like anything Patrick’s ever done with anyone else, but it feels intimate, in the dark, in the space in between their bodies. Anchoring. Jonny keeps hold until they pull up to Patrick’s building, then lets go when Patrick needs to fumble with his wallet to pay. They stand side by side in the elevator, and Patrick can feel nerves and excitement jumbling together in his stomach, making it hard to keep from shifting from foot to foot. 

Whatever momentum they had stops once they get inside Patrick’s apartment, once they’re facing each other in Patrick’s hallway. 

“Let me, uh,” Patrick says. He starts unbuttoning his coat, and Jonny follows suit, then lets Patrick put their coats in his hall closet. It stands as one of five times Jonny has ever put his coat away properly in Patrick’s home, and then they’re both standing in Patrick’s hallway in their wrinkled and tired game day suits. Patrick doesn’t know what this is.

“We going anywhere else?” Jonny asks after a moment, a wry quirk to his mouth.

“Oh. Well,” Patrick says, and feels himself start to smile. “What’s on the table?”

Jonny rolls his eyes, and moves past Patrick further into his apartment. He ends up in the kitchen, getting two glasses of water with efficient motions and no fumbling with cabinets, while Patrick trails behind and sits in one of the kitchen chairs to watch him.

“So,” Jonny says, settling opposite him and pushing one glass toward him, keeping hold of the other. “Can we actually talk, here?”

The tone is so familiar, slightly edged impatience, that Patrick starts laughing. “Jesus christ, I don’t know why I like you.”

“But you do like me,” Jonny says, and he’s looking fond underneath the impatience.

“Yeah,” Patrick says. “At first I thought I just missed you. But.”

“Yeah,” Jonny says, soft. “Me too.” There’s a flush rising high on Jonny’s cheeks and creeping down his neck, and he looks pleased and uncertain at the same time.

“Can we. Not be in my kitchen right now,” Patrick asks, and Jonny starts laughing. He opens his hand on the table, gestures at Patrick, and then they’re standing and Jonny is following Patrick toward his bedroom.

Their suit jackets end up piled on each other on Patrick’s dresser. Jonny has taken his shirt off, Patrick too, and that same jitteriness is back, but this time Patrick knows exactly what he wants to do with it.

“Can I touch you?” Patrick asks. Jonny huffs out a breath, like a laugh but gentler, and takes one of Patrick’s hands and pulls it toward his body. The other hand follows along because Patrick can’t help it. 

Patrick runs his hand up Jonny’s stomach, feeling the softness of Jonny’s skin and the taut muscles underneath his fingertips, and looks up. Jonny’s staring at him, eyes dark. Patrick says, “Breathe, Jonny,” and presses in. Jonny shivers once, and then takes a breath. 

“Wanted to get my hands on you,” Patrick says. “I’ve wanted to--” He watches his hand move up over Jonny’s chest to his shoulder, and then he just stops, cupping over that web of muscle. He rubs his thumb along Jonny’s collarbone. Patrick’s always had a hard time wrapping his head around things he couldn’t touch. He wants to run his hands over all the curves and angles of Jonny’s body so he understands this. 

“What did you want to do,” Jonny says.

“A lot of stuff,” Patrick says. He leans in and presses their cheeks together, and the rasp of stubble against stubble tingles down his chest into his stomach. Jonny turns his face toward Patrick’s and kisses him, hand tightening over Patrick’s on his stomach. His mouth is soft against Patrick’s. Patrick shudders and shifts closer. He feels shaky with how much he wants this, wants the smell of Jonny and the taste of him and the feel of him. 

Jonny lets go of his hand and wraps his arms around Patrick’s waist. Patrick lifts his other hand to the back of Jonny’s neck, and then they are pressed together from hip to cheek, skin against skin. All the times they’d hugged, casually, quickly, ecstatically in celebration on the ice, Patrick had no idea this could be waiting for him. Patrick can feel Jonny’s breath on the side of his face and down his neck. One of Jonny’s hands is warm against the top of his ass, a finger tucked under Patrick’s waistband, the other sliding up his spine. They’re both hard in their dress pants. Patrick’s got to do something about that.

Patrick tilts his head to the side so he can reach Jonny’s ear. “I thought about blowing you,” he says. “It was the first thing I thought about.”

“Jesus,” Jonny says, hands clenching on Patrick’s skin, and Patrick feels his cock jump against Patrick’s thigh. He dips his head down and their lips slide together messily before they kiss again, this time open-mouthed. Patrick loses his direction for a long minute as they make out. They end up with their legs slotted together, rubbing eagerly against each other. Fuck, Patrick could definitely come just from this. Eventually he turns his face to the side and breathes wetly into Jonny’s shoulder. Jonny rests his forehead against Patrick’s temple. When Patrick licks his lips his tongue catches on Jonny’s skin, and Jonny shakes all the way down to his toes, a full-body shudder. 

“I thought you were promising me something,” Jonny says in Patrick’s ear.

Patrick presses his grin into Jonny’s shoulder, then pushes back so that Jonny releases him. Jonny looks a mess, his hair sticking up from Patrick’s hands, dick pushing against the front of his pants.

“Did I promise you something?” Patrick asks and puts his hands on Jonny’s hips and pushes him back in the direction of the bed. He stops just before Jonny has to sit down, and opens Jonny’s belt, unzips his fly, then reaches in and plays his fingers down the warm bulge of Jonny’s cock in his underwear. When he looks up, Jonny has his eyes closed and his mouth open, and Patrick can’t stop himself from lifting up and sucking Jonny’s lower lip into his mouth until Jonny makes a low, soft sound in his throat. “I thought about that,” Patrick says. “You like this?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Jonny says.

“Yeah,” Patrick says. He pulls his hand away, and shoves Jonny down on the bed. Jonny’s knees splay wide, plenty of space for Patrick to kneel between them on his own carpet. Patrick puts his hands on Jonny’s knees, then slides them up so his thumbs are just resting on his open fly. He looks up Jonny’s body to meet his eyes.

Jonny’s hand comes up from where he’s been gripping the edge of the mattress. He gently touches the corner of Patrick’s eye with his index finger and the center of his mouth with his thumb. “Your eyes keep dilating,” Jonny says. “Every time you look at me.”

Patrick tries not to smile but it gets away from him when he says, “I guess I must like what I’m looking at,” and then laughs when Jonny scoffs and pushes his face gently to the side.

“I guess,” Jonny says, looking red again.

“I guess,” Patrick mocks. He surges up to tackle Jonny flat on the bed, too full of a warm, liquid affection to stay down on the ground. “I guess!” 

Jonny gets his hands into Patrick’s hair and drags him in to kiss him, and then wrestles him over until he’s underneath Jonny, breathing hard and running his hands up Jonny’s back to his shoulders and back down to anchor on his ass, pressing in. Jonny finds the spot at the base of Patrick’s clavicle that makes Patrick arch up into him at the same time, a serendipity of timing that has them both groaning.

“Thought you had a plan,” Jonny says breathlessly.

“Fuck,” Patrick stutters. “You. Fucking ruin everything. All of my.” He’s having trouble thinking. They’re both still in their pants, their dress shoes, and if they’re not careful they’re going to come that way.

He fumbles between their bodies, trying to get his own fly open, then gives up and wraps his leg around Jonny’s waist, giving a heave and flipping them back over before slithering back off the bed.

“You’re going to fucking kill me,” he says, popping his belt and pants open quickly, then grabbing Jonny’s trousers and pulling them down just far enough to get Jonny’s dick out. He cradles it for a second. The skin is soft and blood-warm in Patrick’s hand. Patrick licks his lips. When he looks up Jonny has his arm flung over his eyes, bicep tense. He brings his arm down and Patrick lowers his head. He licks from his hand up to the tip, tasting salty skin, then slightly bitter precome. He sucks the head inside and Jonny starts swearing above him. His thighs are tensing under Patrick’s forearm already, but they’re both so revved up by now that Patrick just hums and sucks harder a couple times, then gentler, setting up a rhythm between his mouth and his hand.

“Fuck, Patrick, fuck,” Jonny says, sounding desperate. He curls forward and his hand comes down and clenches on the thick muscle of Patrick’s shoulder. Patrick gasps and has to pull back for a second. He needs to get a hand around himself and stroke once or he thinks he might die. It feels so good that his other hand tightens on Jonny’s cock, like a feedback loop. Jonny groans and thrusts into Patrick’s hand, and when Patrick slides his fist up and down, Jonny wraps his hand around Patrick’s, squeezes their hands as he slides them back up, and comes all over his own stomach and their joined hands.

“Oh, fuck,” he says again, weakly. He loosens his grip and then drops back flat on the bed. Patrick slides his hand up again and watches the aftershocks rock through Jonny’s body, until Jonny bats his hand away. 

“Come up here,” Jonny says. “Take off the rest of your stuff. One of us should get all the way naked.”

Patrick obeys dumbly, and then lays down next to Jonny. Jonny reaches out and pulls on Patrick’s leg so that he turns onto his side, facing Jonny, and then Jonny just licks his palm and wraps it around Patrick’s dick. He runs his other hand from Patrick’s hip to the back of his knee, crooking his leg so he can rock forward between Jonny’s hand on Patrick’s dick and the crease of Jonny’s groin. Patrick can’t help the breathy noise he makes when Jonny’s fingers drag against the sensitive skin behind his knee, and Jonny pauses for a second before rubbing circles in time with Patrick’s thrusting into his other hand. 

“Oh,” Patrick says in a long, drawn out sound. Everything is tightening up in that rhythm and friction. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them to look at Jonny, staring intently at his own hands. Patrick bites his lip. His eyes fall shut again and then he comes. 

He collapses forward afterward so he can sling more of his body over Jonny’s, and they just breathe together for a long handful of minutes. Eventually Patrick becomes aware of the zipper of Jonny’s pants digging into his thigh, the sweat and come cooling on their bodies, the way the slight breeze from the central air is prickling across his body.

“See, there we go,” Patrick mumbles into Jonny’s shoulder.

“What?” Jonny’s hand, which had been cradling the nape of Patrick’s neck, moves to card through his hair.

“That was my plan,” Patrick said. Jonny tugs on Patrick’s hair and snorts, but when Patrick looks up, he’s got that gentle quirk to one side of his mouth that says he thinks Patrick is great.

***

Much later, after they’ve self-consciously gotten up and showered and Patrick has snapped Jonny’s ass with a towel because it was so big and _right there_ and Jonny has wrestled Patrick down to the ground and made out with him to the point that they needed another shower, they’re back in Patrick’s room, lying in his bed. Jonny’s breathing evenly, still awake but heading toward sleep, familiar to Patrick from five years across the room in the other bed. 

Patrick says, “I thought about asking you, when I got back from Switzerland, if we could stay rooming together.”

The bed shakes as Jonny turns over. “What?” He sounds sleepy, but heading back toward alertness.

“You know. Like, maybe it didn’t make sense to mess with what worked.”

It’s dark, and Jonny is silent for so long that Patrick can feel himself sliding toward sleep before Jonny speaks again. “I don’t think I’d’ve said yes. I thought. I think the space was good for us.”

“I’m not saying you should’ve,” Patrick says. “I’m not, like, upset about it.” He reaches out until he can touch Jonny’s shoulder, and pats it. “I just thought it was funny. That I thought about asking you that.”

“You were a little bit upset,” Jonny says.

“Shut up, I’m glad about where we are,” Patrick says.

“That’s good, I guess,” Jonny says, and then laughs lowly. “I guess I kind of heard that you’d left it up to me. I thought you were being weirdly polite.”

“I am super polite,” Patrick yawns.

“Shut up, Kaner,” Jonny says. He wraps an arm around Patrick’s waist. “Stop thinking about things and go to sleep. Anything else you can tell me in the morning.”

Patrick yawns into his pillow again and angles his head down. The room is dark and quiet, and the perfect temperature, a little chilly on Patrick’s face. Exactly how he and Jonny like it. Underneath the comforter, Jonny is warm near him. Patrick turns over under his arm and shifts backward so he can feel that warmth all along his back. 

“Okay. Good night, Jonny.”

“Good night,” Jonny says.

***  
[END]

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my excellent writing buddies, [maleyka](http://archiveofourown.org/users/maleyka/pseuds/maleyka) and [ellievolia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ellievolia/pseuds/ellievolia), who were enthusiastic and gave great input, to my girl [tricksterquinn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tricksterquinn/pseuds/tricksterquinn) for holding my hand and letting me spew words at her even though I had to explain the concept of the lockout and she couldn't care less about these strange characters, and finally to [gigantic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gigantic), whose original chat conversation started this story (little did she know), nine months ago. 
> 
> Grateful, grateful thanks to [altri_uccelli](http://archiveofourown.org/users/altri_uccelli/pseuds/altri_uccelli) for providing such a spot-on, speedy beta.
> 
> You guys are all the best!
> 
>  **ETA 07 Aug 2014:** I wrote a [timestamp on tumblr](http://joyfulseeker.tumblr.com/post/78357188369/kaner-tazer-sharing-a-bed-pleaseeeeeeee-or) for this story in March of 2014.


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